The Magician

Chapter 8

Chandra closed her book and rested her head on the back of the couch, stretching her arms and legs. She was on a break. One more week until she'd get back to university. It felt good to not have anything to do. She smiled and stood up.

The house was quiet. Her mum was out shopping and her dad was working in the garden.

After a minute of thinking, Chandra decided to go to the attic and see if she could find anything interesting. It had been a while since she last went up there.

To Chandra's surprise, the attic wasn't very dusty. There were still particles of dust dancing in the air in the ray of sunlight coming in through the window, but the room was overall less dustier than Chandra expected. Her mum had probably cleaned it up recently.

She walked to a pile of boxes and picked up the one on the top . It was mostly filled with old cutlery, so she picked the one below. That one turned out to have her childhood clothes.

Chandra laughed at the sight of them. They were so small! For some of them, she remembered the first time she wore or bought them.

She spent some time on that box, carefully taking each piece of clothing out and examining it. After she went through all of them, she put everything back in the box and opened a new one.

The new box was pretty big and contained all of Chandra's drawings and handcrafts. Chandra's mouth opened in awe. She was shocked at how much stuff she had.

She started taking each drawing out carefully, examining it. The first few were drawings of random animals and objects such as ducks, cats, a table, a house, and stuff like that. The other one, was her first drawing of the family.

They were stick figures and what made them different was the hair of each person and the girls having eyelashes. There were four people in the picture; Chandra's parents, Chandra and standing next to her, a boy. The boy appeared in other drawings as well. Nex up was another handcraft. It was like a photo frame that held another one of Chandra's family drawings. This one had a lot of glitter on it.

Drawing after drawing after handcraft after drawing. It kept going until she finally reached the end. In the very bottom, there was a polaroid with a fading picture on it. Chandra took it out. It was a picture of her - around three or four years old - laughing in the arms of a boy - perhaps fourteen years old. He had dark hair and pale skin. The combination of his face and hair would remind you of the moon in a dark night.

She looked at the picture for a while. It seemed to have unlocked an old memory in her mind. She was little. Very little. The boy walked in through the door, his voice somehow still echoing through Chandra's mind.

- Hi!

He had a big and cheerful smile on his face. Chandra ran towards him as he picked her up, both laughing.

A moment of silence and Chandra finally snapped out of it. She started putting all the contents of the box back where they were but kept the small polaroid in her pocket.

After being done with that, she opened another box. This one was full of pictures. There was a group of polaroids held together by a rubber band. Chandra took them out and started looking through them. They all had the boy in them. It bothered Chandra because she knew him, she knew that she knew him! But not clearly. Snippets of memories showed up in her mind; she knew that the boy was nice, warm, kind, and she loved him, but didn't clearly know who he was. After going through the set of polaroids a couple of times, an idea sparked in her brain which made her heart pound. But she had to make sure.

After that, Chandra went looking through all the other boxes. Cutlery, old toys, old CDs and DVDs, a bunch of stuff she had no idea what they were, and finally found the box she was looking for. She opened it, it was full of old magazines and newspapers. After going through some of them, Chandra finally found what she was looking for and her heart dropped as she did so.

Now she remembered the boy.